J.A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of both the J. P. Beaumont series and the Joanna Brady Series. She has written 40 novels and she has more than 10 million copies of her books in print. Visit her Web site: JAJance.com.

Traveling I-5

Bill and I have been traveling the I-5 corridor for 26 or our 27 years together. The first trip, in honor of my parents 50th Wedding anniversary, was memorable for any number of reasons. Let’s just say that staying in a hotel called The Chalet in Needles, California, was a bad idea! It might have improved since then, but we haven’t gone back. And traveling back up the road from Tucson to Seattle that trip, we arrived in Redding too late to get a good hotel. We ended up at a disaster called The Americana where one lamp switch-on too many caused a: an electrical short and b: a mattress fire. For years my mother regaled friends and relations with her version of how the newlyweds set their mattress on fire. Of course, her story bore no relation to the REAL cause of the fire, but I guess my storytelling genes had to come from somewhere. And ever since, Bill and I have pulled hotel mattresses away from walls to make sure there are no frayed wires behind them.

That was only the first of our many I-5 adventures. Let’s see. There were the blizzards, most notably Mount Shasta and Vancouver and Central Oregon. The last one left us stranded unexpectedly at the Hilton Hotel in Eugene on New Years Eve. Someone had made plans for a big party. When none of the invited guests could get there, everyone in the hotel, us included, ended up being invited instead.

I believe that I may have mentioned in another post that the US of A is a “tall country.” It is. Driving from Seattle to Tucson takes 26 hours of wheels on the ground and pedal to the metal. We generally break it into three days, Seattle to Ashland, Ashland to Bakersfield, Bakersfield to Tucson, and we follow the same pattern in the reverse. Those are three long days on the road with time off for gas and maybe a Whopper Junior.

There are events along the way that can make trip a day or two longer. There was the ice storm in Portland that left our dogs and us stranded for two days at the Riverplace–a very nice place to be stranded. And then there’s the inevitable car trouble.

For our first stint of genuine snow-birding, we were headed south in early December, driving in a used Ford minivan that we had taken off our son’s hands as a financial favor when he got a job that included a company car. As far as we knew, the car was in good shape when we loaded it for the trip to Tucson. When we had left Tucson months earlier, we had removed the back seat and created a wooden luggage rack in the back of the vehicle. During the next trip down, we were loaded for bear, with our two Goldens, Aggie and Daphne, riding with the luggage in the back.

In Bakersfield while getting gas, Bill checked the water and oil. All good. But as we hit the first steep part of the Grapevine, something gave way. There was a puff of smoke and we lost power. We limped along for another mile or so in the right lane before we finally managed to exit at a place called LeBec. No phone. No gas station. No fast food joint. We called AAA. They had a hard time locating LeBec, but eventually a tow truck, complete with a crazed driver, showed up to fetch us. He drove like a maniac for the seventy miles between there and the Ford dealership in Santa Clarita with us crammed into the seat beside him and with Ag and Daph sitting wild eyed in the front seat of the minivan. (They must have thought they were driving themselves.)

We spent the remainder of that Sunday afternoon buying a car. It had to be a minivan because that was the only way we were going to get to Tucson with our dogs and all our stuff. The dealership had one, but the problem is, you don’t get much of a deal when your trade-in is hauled onto the lot by a tow-truck with the engine still smoking. So it was the opposite of the old car salesman routine of “What’s it going to take to get you in this car today?” Instead, we were saying, “Please let us buy this car and get back on the road!” Hours later, we struck a deal, but even though they were giving us next to nothing on the trade in, the manager insisted that we had to bring back the missing third seat. The one that was in Tucson. And so, with it starting to rain (Yes, it does rain in southern California!) we removed the third seat from the new minivan, loaded our worldly goods into that one, and took off for Tucson where, upon arrival the following day, we had to immediately reverse the process and return to Santa Clarita with the missing seat.

We never liked that car much–shotgun weddings are like that. We owned it for a couple of years before we traded it in on the Dodge Minivan we have now. But for as long as we owned the one we bought in Santa Clarita we called it our Ford Fiasco for obvious reasons.

But those are the LONG trips on I-5. For 26 years we’ve also driven back and forth to Ashland for the plays. That trip is usually a single eight hour day with a stop in Sutherlin for the Whopper and/or coffee and a stop at the Country Cousin in Centralia for either breakfast or fried chicken, depending on whether we’re coming or going.

To get to Ashland you have to drive the whole length of Oregon because the town is only sixteen miles from the California border. And along the way, you will see countless misleading highway signs announcing “Ocean Beaches” or “Crater Lake.” From the signs, it’s easy to believe that the ocean and the lake are just out of sight, sort of like the motels and restaurants that are listed on the highway signs but aren’t right at the intersection. It turns out this is false advertising. Yes, the ocean is there, but it’s a lot like grandmother’s house–you have to go over the river(s) and through the woods and mountains to get there.

After countless years of whining on my part, we’ve finally broken that code. Several times now, on our way to and from Ashland we’ve managed to visit the Oregon Coast–Cannon Beach or Lincoln City. And we’ve enjoyed them, but the one Oregon stop that seemed forever out of reach was Crater Lake.

This week we cracked that nut, too. You don’t end up at Crater Lake accidentally. It’s a long trip, but it’s spectacular when you get there. The thought of one cataclysmic blast blowing up the mountain and leaving that huge crater is astonishing. It was beautiful. It was daunting. And it left me wondering if the animals living there had some advance knowledge of the coming disaster like animals seem to know in advance about tsunamis.

So we’re taking five days to make the trip to Tucson this time around–five whole days. We drove from Seattle to Eugene, Eugene to Ashland via Crater Lake, Ashland to Stockton, Stockton to Pasadena, and today we’ll do Pasadena to Tucson.